Why The Smoking Disclaimer In Movies Is A Farce

A movie is supposed to be an enjoyable experience in theatres. You pay money for the ambience and good quality of audio and print. If you’re really lucky, then the film itself turns out to be good as well.

Studies have, after all, shown that movies are the best form of immersive experience we experience.

Over the past few months, the film industry has had to bow to powerful anti-smoking lobbies to insert a disclaimer that says that smoking is injurious to health, and that the events and personalities in the movie you’re watching do not endorse any form of tobacco consumption. This message is usually accompanied by gory images of people with oral cancer, supposedly to get smokers worried about what might become of them if they continue smoking. It serves no purpose other than make you laugh at the first slide when disclaimer is misspelled as “Disclamer”.

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Then there is the visual of the tar content found in the average smoker’s lungs in another segment that follows soon after. With the help of a dirty yellow sponge, a tar-like substance is squeezed to fill a beaker about halfway through. This is followed by a voiceover that says, over-simplistically, “(The tar) is enough to make you sick – very sick.” Scientific understanding and nuanced argument can go take a walk in the park. A viewer must take the voiceover’s word as sacred and reform himself, or so the anti-smoking segment thinks.

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How I wish this inane torture ended with this. But alas, the tar visual gives way to something even more bizarre.

A doctor coming along, telling you of a patient called Mukesh who suffered from oral cancer, usually follows the message. After a confession in front of the camera by Mukesh, the doctor informs us in his most somber tone that Mukesh could not be saved, even though he was just 24 years of age. It is meant to evoke sympathy and moral outrage, but all it does is annoy and irritate.

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This is the sort of ambiguous moral play that can get anyone’s goat. There are a few things more annoying than having an opinion shoved down your throat. Smokers wouldn’t care less what is being said about the ill-effects of tobacco abuse simply because they have adopted a thick shell that prevents them from reacting to such messages.

I would even encourage such messages if they were made with a purpose that actually made sense to their intended audience. But giving blanket statements and stereotyping smokers is not going to help anyone here, will it?

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A theatre hall is a place to enjoy cinema. Audiences do not come in expecting to be mollycoddled into learning the ill-effects of smoking. There are plenty of other places from where this information can be disseminated. Not only do these short films put a sour taste in your mouth, but they also treat you as if you had no power over your thinking. Dear anti-smoking lobbyists, they may patronize Salman Khan’s movies but that does not mean that audiences do not have a mind of their own. Inserting the ‘Smoking is Injurious’ disclaimer every time a character starts puffing is not the way to spread your message. It is infringing on my right to watch to a movie with your needless distractions.

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You may claim that youngsters pick up the habit from filmstars, but are you so naïve as to think that this farce of yours in theatres will help in any substantial way? If yes, then you really need to get out of your smokescreen and look for real solutions than these films. This is one annoyance we all can live without.